


superiority and regret

by itallstartedwithdefenestration



Category: Rope (1948)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-16
Updated: 2017-08-16
Packaged: 2018-12-16 00:48:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,101
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11817723
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/itallstartedwithdefenestration/pseuds/itallstartedwithdefenestration
Summary: Phillip remembers David's hat in the coat closet.





	superiority and regret

**Author's Note:**

> this didn't quite turn out the way i'd expected but i'm still proud of it all the same. just a little what-if au because honestly the whole hat thing has always bothered me

Phillip remembers the hat while Brandon is occupied with fixing the edge of the tablecloth. He is for a moment tempted to leave it where it is—Brandon clearly has no idea it’s there—but he knows also that would result in his own incrimination. Spite and revenge have their places in the relationship, but in situations where they can be fucked out later. Fucked out and forgotten, not resulting in being locked away forever in a jail cell. 

He takes the hat from the coat closet in the foyer and throws it under their bed. The sheets are still vaguely rumpled from the night previous and Phillip angrily slams the door shut on his way back into the parlor. Brandon spares him half a glance over his shoulder: 

“Phillip, what is it—”

“David had on a hat when he came in,” Phillip snaps, walking over to where Brandon is standing beside the coffin and pushing the plate of cold meats over a half inch, watching in dull satisfaction Brandon’s eyes chase the new wrinkle in the tablecloth. “Or didn’t you remember that?”

Nearly fifteen years of knowing each other has its advantages; Phillip sees, without even really looking, the brief tightening at the corners of Brandon’s mouth, the only betrayal that he realizes he fucked up. A moment later he’s taking out another cigarette and lighting it staring at the wall, the painting of fruit his mother gave them for Christmas. 

“Did you take care of—”

“Yes,” Phillip says, short. The afternoon is far from over but already its events are culminating and pouring into him, too much, too fast. Sometimes when he looks at Brandon he can hardly bear it except to think of how well they fit each other in bed, and that to leave Brandon would mean starting over, all over again, and it was exhausting enough in boarding school, when they were fifteen and pliable and if it hadn’t worked out they could’ve passed it off easily enough as a fluke of loneliness, and long nights in a cramped dorm room. But Phillip’s nearly thirty now and he’s never learned, as Brandon seems to have, how to easily pass off his uncertainties and his inability to connect with anyone else outside.

“Good,” Brandon says. He holds out the lighter. “Have a cigarette. Have a drink. I can’t stop to fuck the stiffness out of your muscles right now.” It’s exactly the sort of tense and cruel thing he likes to say when he knows Phillip can’t do anything about it, the sadistic turn of phrase he thinks is clever. Like he thinks everything that comes from his mouth is clever. Phillip misses being only charmed by him. Things were so much simpler when he was young enough to believe falling in love was as easy as a fairy tale. 

“Brandon—”

But Mrs. Wilson’s key is turning in the lock, and Brandon is already turning from Phillip. He’s holding his shoulders in that proper rich boy way he was already carrying by the time he came to prep school and for one nasty moment Phillip wishes it was Brandon, not David, who had been strangled and buried in the chest. 

Later he will not be able to pinpoint exactly how he makes it through the evening without breaking down. Their friends come one by one, and then the Kentleys, and Phillip thinks he’s like to come out of his skin upon seeing the expression on Mr. Kentley’s face, the worry building as time passes and David doesn’t show, and doesn’t show, and doesn’t show. Occasionally he sneaks looks at Brandon to see how he should act, as he always has. Mostly he just drinks, and avoids the chest as much as he can, and tries not to look at Rupert, and drinks, and smokes, and drinks. Rupert at some point corners him at the piano and attacks him with questions about chicken strangling and his parents’ farm and it is only by struggling very hard with what’s left of his ragged sanity that he is able to keep from telling the truth. Brandon keeps a steady stream of entertainment and charm up the whole evening—Phillip notices him keep one eye on Rupert most of the time, as though watching for some sign that Rupert gets it, and approves, as though they’re still students… Once or twice Brandon looks at Phillip as though to check on him and make sure he isn’t entirely drowning and Phillip hates how much calmer it makes him feel. As though his relief is palpable and giving Brandon some kind of satisfaction. 

Brandon has a habit of touching his mouth when he’s thinking. As such he touches his mouth most of the evening, stroking over it with his thumb and the cigarette burning, laughing, sometimes inappropriately, watching Mr. Kentley and Rupert for one thing and Kenneth and Janet for another. Keeping Mrs. Atwater and Mrs. Wilson both busy and captivated as always by his speech and the amused curl to his mouth. Only Phillip can read the condescension behind the smile. The way Brandon is laughing at all of them every time he or any of them looks at the chest. Or touches it. Or eats from it. Rupert skirts close to figuring it out a few times, but he never comes quite close enough. When at length Mr. Kentley announces his desire to leave, Phillip watches, fever-drunk and shaking, as Mrs. Wilson removes Rupert’s hat from the coat closet—his heart skittering—and then as their guests pour out into the hallway. Rupert tosses one final, curious look over his shoulder at the both of them—Brandon smirking, Phillip barely holding his composure—and then he leaves too. 

“Well,” Brandon says, when everything’s gone quiet. “That was a success.” 

Phillip sits dully upon the sofa underneath the window. Their bottle of whiskey is mostly empty and he tosses the rest back without stopping to pour it into a glass first. The burn is sharp and angry in his throat. “Depends on what you mean by ‘success’,” he says. 

Brandon is already lighting another cigarette. Phillip can’t remember how many he’s smoked in the past ten minutes alone. “No one saw the h-hat,” he says. “Rupert didn’t figure it out.” He walks forward until he is standing nearly within the space of Phillip’s legs; he reaches down and takes the empty bottle from Phillip’s hand and Phillip is too drunk and too shaken to stop him. “Now all we have to do is, is get Da—is get the chest out of here, and into the lake at the farm. Everything—That’s all that’s left.” 

Phillip is staring at Brandon’s stomach, and at his chest. The slight fluttering of his dress shirt where his heart beats in steady rhythm. He opens his mouth and finds the words are not forthcoming. He’s overheated and flushed from the drink and from the building anticipation of the evening and suddenly with a sharp cry he leans forward, head in his hands. He thinks he is going to vomit on the rug and on Brandon’s shoes but he finds he is crying instead. Brandon’s hand is in his hair and he’s making soft worried unfamiliar noises like he himself is stuttering upon the edge of panic—for a moment Phillip is unaware of his surroundings and when he comes back into himself Brandon is holding his face. Tilting his jaw upward. 

“Okay,” he’s saying. Phillip isn’t sure who he’s talking to. “Okay.”

His thumb skates over the raw tender skin under Phillip’s eye. It’s a long moment before either of them move or even breathe. Brandon looks unfamiliar like this. He does not wear worry or compassion well and yet still like a starved animal Phillip leans into it. Swallows it whole. 

The rest of the night he moves as though in a dream. Allows Brandon to instruct him, to ground him. They clean up, methodical and slow. Brandon washes the dishes while from their room Phillip takes the hat and a few clothes they haven’t packed yet and puts all of it in their last remaining suitcase which he sets beside the door. They move it and the chest with David’s body downstairs and into the trunk of Brandon’s waiting car parked behind the building. Their suitcases already are stacked neatly in the backseat, two each. Their keys they take with them, and Brandon’s cigarettes, and Phillip’s music, tucked under his coat. Everything else, the clean dishes and silverware and empty whiskey bottles, Brandon’s favored painting over the mantelpiece and Phillip’s over the piano, their bedsheets and Brandon’s aftershave—he has what he considers a better kind at his mother’s place—all of it stays behind. As though to provide the illusion of having just gone on vacation. As though they plan to come back soon. Or ever.

In fact Phillip, as he steps into the passenger seat and closes the door behind him, does not know what Brandon’s plans are. How long he intends to stay away. But he is too tired and too drunk to worry, and Brandon’s there now, anyway, smoking languidly out the driver’s side window as he pulls out of his parking space, that casual look of dispassionate uncaring in the rich blue of his eyes… Phillip does not want to think, everything will be all right with him here, but he cannot help the thought slipping through his brain like through clear water… He leans his head against the cool of the window and watches the streetlights disappear into the dark. Then for a long time he does not watch anything. 

~

When he wakes they are pulling into the gravel road that starts the half-mile drive to Brandon’s mother’s farmhouse. The sky is the odd nostalgic gray-blue that precedes sunrise. Around them the air hangs with residual white fog. At some point during the night Phillip finds Brandon covered him with a thick blanket and he pulls it tighter around his shoulders, shifting his skin from the sticky wet place where it cemented against the glass. His head aches in a distant way that tells him it’ll hurt worse later when he’s more awake. There are birds waking up in soft discord against the slow rocking of the car on the gravel and Phillip can see the sky lightening in bluish gradient the further they drive and the trees are overhung with moss and dew and their former friend is dead in the trunk of the car. 

His stomach lurches. Frantically he smacks at Brandon who jerks the wheel to the side and Phillip and his blanket spill out of the car. He is sick in the soft tall grass with the wind cool on his skin and the air thin and light in the pre-dawn. Everything is spinning or throbbing or a sickening mixture of both. 

Then there’s Brandon’s hand on his shoulders, and Phillip wants to shake him off as much as he wants to lean into the touch. It’s the usual way he feels around him, consistently at war with himself, with how he feels about Brandon, about himself with Brandon, all of it. He hates it as much as he loves it, as much as he craves it. He thinks perhaps there was some time in his life when he knew he could survive without this, when he could know who he was without Brandon, but that time has long passed. And Phillip no longer cares enough about whatever morals he may still have to distinguish between how much of him is in love with Brandon and how much of him simply needs the devouring intense obsessive attention. He thinks perhaps the two have entwined too much to ever be pulled apart, anyway.

“We’re here,” Brandon says. Rubbing at Phillip’s spine. He’s trembling a little; Phillip understands enough to know if he points it out Brandon will say he hasn’t had a cigarette in a while. “It’s—we’re all right. We’re all right.” He points up the road a way. “There’s the lake. It’s just—it’s just there.”

Phillip nods, then decides perhaps that’s a bad idea. “Okay,” he says. Hoarse. 

Brandon’s fingers find their way into the ends of Phillip’s hair. “Y-You will… help me, won’t you, Phillip?”

Phillip closes his eyes against the increasing brightness of the morning. He can smell Brandon’s cigarettes and the lingering starch on his clothes and the Brylcreem in his hair. In the far distance he can hear the animals. 

“Yes,” he says. “You know I will, Brandon.”


End file.
